Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti Gaming G1

Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti Gaming G1 Review – Pity the poor Titan X owners. No sooner had they spent $1500 on their imposing new benchmark-slayer than NVIDIA released the affordable version of the same GPU in the GTX 980 Ti. This is for all intents and purposes a Titan X with less onboard memory, with just 6GB of GDDR5 compared to the Titan X’s 12GB.

Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti Gaming G, The Cream of The Crop

At the heart of the GTX 980 Ti is the same GM200 GPU found in Titan X, but it’s had a slight trimming. The total number of CUDA cores drops from 3072 to 2816, while the Texture Units also drops, from 192 to 176. Yet in every other area it’s basically identical, including the 1000MHz base speed and 1075MHz Boost Speed. Gigabyte has gone one better though, increasing the base speed by a whopping 19% to 1190MHz, while the Boost speed has increased by a similarly impressive 20%, up to 1291MHz. This is only when the card is in OC mode though, which brings a slightly increased fan noise with it. We tested the card in game mode, where the Boost speed only increases to 1241MHz, which is still very impressive.

Gigabyte has been able to overclock it so highly thanks to a combination of the 980 Ti’s general excellent overclocking ability, as well as the new Windforce 3X 600W cooler. This triple fan cooler mightn’t look to good, but with a fan noise of just 48dB it’s a ripper. With top-tier performance the GTX 980 Ti only has one competitor worth talking about – AMD’s new Fury X GPU. But you’ll have to read the exclusive review of that elsewhere in this issue to see whether NVIDIA or AMD hold the title of fastest single-GPU card on the planet.